I actually considered that option, while writing the comment (and should probably have said so, my bad). I guess I considered it improbable that the task you describe you would actually think of as easy. To me, it does not seems to meet the characteristics, specially not after 3500 LOC.
To put a little bone on the flesh from my side of the isle: I am currently writing what I would consider a fairly complex (web) system in Rails, managing all aspects of a medical startup (patient portal, provider platform, documentation, billing, scheduling, PWAs). Think in terms of complexity and aspiration what might be required to run https://www.onemedical.com/
I understand that it is not John Carmack type work, but I would not describe it as either easy or simple. But maybe you would – and then this is where all the confusion ends :)
I do this mostly in Windsurf using the new Gemini 2.5 pro (which just came out recently and is a huge jump up; before that it was mostly Sonnet 3.7). It writes probably around 95% of LOC and it also definitely does what I would consider some of the code design, although there the contribution percentage is much lower and it's definitely more of a thought partner, that can do some things better than I can. There is definitely a lot of collaborative plan writing involved, todo lists with check-off boxes and explicit instructions on the process.
What it absolutely does not do is, well, anything, unless I explain to it what I want good enough. That part comes relatively natural, because I would normally just write a lot before coding/designing to understand that it is what I want. That lends itself to work with the LLM I guess (and I just now wonder if most of the daylight can be found there)
Interesting, so in your experience Gemini 2.5 Pro bests Claude 3.7 ? I didn’t pay much attention to it, will give it a go, thanks for the reference!
Again, I think of the task I mentioned as not easy (it’s a lot of code) but it is simple (it’s a very boring for me code that I know how to write).
Caveat: (and I realized this throughout our exchange) is that the definition of “simple” differs a lot depending on the person and the field they are in vs. the domain of the task.
In part the task was “simple” by my standard is I have three decades of experience in the field, and the task is within my domain (networking protocols). 3500 LoC was what LLM generated, I will need to refactor and probably reduce that.
What you describe in my view would be probably “ complicated” (will require a lot of knowledge I don’t have) & “not easy” (it is lots of code) - I can imagine the data model is probably not trivial, plus you have to think a lot about potential extension points, future data migrations, etc)
Collaborative planning is an interesting new use, I will try it out, thanks for sharing!
FWIW, this past week I wrote up my uses of LLM (Claude 3.7) and published them, for a longer form experience than my comments here).
Your comment that you have to explain very well to it what you want is in part what I wanted to convey - LLM is an amplifier/executor, rather than a creative generator. The initiative is still fully yours.
To put a little bone on the flesh from my side of the isle: I am currently writing what I would consider a fairly complex (web) system in Rails, managing all aspects of a medical startup (patient portal, provider platform, documentation, billing, scheduling, PWAs). Think in terms of complexity and aspiration what might be required to run https://www.onemedical.com/
I understand that it is not John Carmack type work, but I would not describe it as either easy or simple. But maybe you would – and then this is where all the confusion ends :)
I do this mostly in Windsurf using the new Gemini 2.5 pro (which just came out recently and is a huge jump up; before that it was mostly Sonnet 3.7). It writes probably around 95% of LOC and it also definitely does what I would consider some of the code design, although there the contribution percentage is much lower and it's definitely more of a thought partner, that can do some things better than I can. There is definitely a lot of collaborative plan writing involved, todo lists with check-off boxes and explicit instructions on the process.
What it absolutely does not do is, well, anything, unless I explain to it what I want good enough. That part comes relatively natural, because I would normally just write a lot before coding/designing to understand that it is what I want. That lends itself to work with the LLM I guess (and I just now wonder if most of the daylight can be found there)